Health

People, Spaces, Deliberation bloggers present exceptional campaign art from all over the world. These examples are meant to inspire.

If you think about your community (family, friends, colleagues, etc), you probably know someone who has or has had breast cancer. According to the World Cancer Research Fund International, in 2012, breast cancer was the second most common cancer, with about 1.7 million new cases registered.

The good news, if any, is that breast cancer has a very high survival rates (of over 90%) when detected and treated at an early stage. A good way to detect cancer early is to perform routine self-exams to search for any lumps or changes in the breast area. A recommended time to do these self-exams is when we are naked and alone – and these conditions are met when we are in the shower.

To incentivize self-exams amongst the local population in Puerto Rico, HIMA San Pablo – a network of hospitals – came up with this public health awareness campaign. They distributed soap with a reminder carved in each soap bar and with waterproof instructions to correctly perform self-examinations in the shower.

Co-authored with Cheryl Cashin, Senior Program Director, Results for Development

In the early 1990s, after 70 years of a socialist system, Mongolia transitioned to a market economy and embarked on reform across all sectors, including health. Since that time, the health system has gradually moved from a centralized “Semashko-style” model to a somewhat more decentralized financing and service delivery, with a growing role for private sector providers and private out-of-pocket financing.

​Each year on March 22 we mark World Water Day. It is an opportunity to keep the urgent water issues – from lack of sanitation to transboundary water to climate change -- top of my mind for practitioners, decision makers and the global public. In the coming days we will post here updates and stories from the field, as well as links to some of our partners’ content. But, more importantly, this is an opportunity to hear from you, too.

For those trying to address challenges in global poverty, inclusive businesses offer solutions to some of the world’s most intractable social problems. Business models that create value for the low-income communities are becoming viable - these have been tested, fine-tuned and perfected by some of the finest brains. Once perfected, it makes sense to contextualize and spread these innovations or the knowledge to markets across the globe. To be able to do this, replication is an important tool.

Traffic congestion results in an estimated productivity loss of around PHP2.4 billion ($54 million) a day or more than PHP800 billion ($18 billion) a year.

From my house in northern Quezon City, I drive more than two hours every day to get to the office in Bonifacio Global City, which is about three cities away where I come from, and two cities away from the capital Manila. It’s a journey that should only take around half an hour under light traffic. That is a total of four hours on the road a day, if there is no road accident or bad weather. It takes me an hour longer whenever I use the public transport system. Along with hundreds of thousands of Metro Rail Transit (MRT) commuters, I have to contend with extremely long lines, slow trains, and frequent delays due to malfunctions. This has been my experience for several years. Many of us might be wondering: why have these problems persisted?

Our Top Ten blog posts by readership in 2014.
This post was originally posted on August 06, 2014

In the wake of the current Ebola crisis, the 2011 movie Contagion (See the trailer here) directed by Steven Soderbergh has repeatedly been cited as one of the best examples of a movie taking on the subject of pandemic disease and managing to educate while providing gripping entertainment. This is no coincidence.Contagion was produced with both A-list stars (Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, and others) and support from leading public health experts such as Dr. Ian Lipkin who is the inspiration for one of the scientists portrayed in the film, and award-winning writer Laurie Garrett, author of several books including The Coming Plague. Participant Media, founded by Jeff Skoll to inspire social change through entertainment, was a producer, with the Skoll Global Threats Fund, World Health Organization (WHO), and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) providing input as well.

The tagline from the film is “No One is Immune…to Fear.” While one of the early scenes is of a woman dying of a flu-like illness (played by Paltrow) the movie elicits fear not from gruesome symptoms but instead from plot lines and messages that focus on how human responses to these types of public health crises make matters worse. It also showcases the valuable work done by epidemiologists and other public health workers who are the heroes of this film. Contagion communicates these and other lessons effectively using the power of story, a subject recently discussed on this blog.

Back in the 1930s, Sri Lanka thought it would be a good idea to give everyone free access to health care. More than 75 years later, as the global health community bangs the drum for universal health coverage (UHC), Sri Lankans can be forgiven for letting out a yawn and wondering what all the fuss is about. But as shown by a workshop organized in Colombo last week to mark the first World UHC Day, the concept of universal health coverage (“all people receive the health services they need without suffering financial hardship”) does still have relevance here.

Start with the history. By 1960 Sri Lanka’s health indicators were already well above the curve for its income level, and it was close to having the best health outcomes in developing Asia. It started the MDG era in 1990 with a level of child mortality that was lower than where most Asian countries – including Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, and its South Asian neighbors India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – will finish it in 2015. Vaccination rates are above 99%. And all this was achieved without results-based financing, conditional cash transfers, or today’s other proposed silver bullet solutions for improving health.

Today marks the second annual UN World Toilet Day, an important opportunity to promote global efforts to achieve universal access to sanitation by 2030. With a focus on equality and dignity, this year, World Toilet Day aims to highlight sanitation as a global development priority, especially for women and girls who must compromise their dignity and put their safety at risk when lack of access to sanitation forces them to defecate in the open.